Designing Dependable Dynamic Workflows through a Reflective PN-Based Approach

The management of dynamic workflows needs adequate formal models and support tools to handle in a safe way changes occurring during workflow operation. A common approach is to pollute models with details that do not regard the workflow behavior, rather its evolution. That hampers analysis, reuse and maintenance in general. We propose and discuss the adoption of a recent Petri net-based reflective model to support dynamic workflow design, by addressing a localized open problem: how to determine what tasks should be redone and which ones do not when transferring a workflow instance from an old to a new template. The idea behind is that keeping functional aspects separated from evolutionary ones, applying evolution to a workflow template only when necessary, results in a clean reference model of dynamic workflows on which the ability of verifying major workflow properties favors a dependable evolution.